COLUMN: Hard to pronounce, impossible to forget

By Bill Williams

Published: Sunday, May 19, 2013 at 07:28 PM.

Joe was on a first-name basis with every sheriff for years. When Dwight Beam was sheriff, he made Joe a trustee and put him in charge of the kitchen. Later, Sheriff Leroy Russell said, “Joe was just like a person on the payroll. You could depend on him to work hard and do a good job.”

I doubt if anyone knows what put Joe on the bottle. He probably didn’t know himself. He served a hitch in the U.S. Infantry during World War II, but he always refused to talk about that.

His last few years found Joe with watery eyes and muscles that had turned to fat and flab. His step was tentative as worry and concern invaded his mind.

“It’s time for me to straighten up,” he told a friend.

But it seemed that he never did.

Bill Williams is a former editor of The Gazette and writes a weekly column.

Many years ago — say in the 1950s and ’60s — part of my job at The Gazette was to cover the local police beat and its first cousin, the courts.

It was a one-two punch that often led to familiarity. We got to know the participants by first name.

There was a Joe, for instance. He has been dead now for years. But his name and memories of the man himself will never be forgotten.

His police blotter name was Joe Tscheiller — hard to pronounce, not easy to say. “Joe” was easy. It was the “Tscheiller” that got the tongue-tangled. After a while, however, after it was used enough, it came out easy. He ’splained it. Said it was pronounced “Sch-leer.”

Some people, when they saw it in the paper, still tried to associate it with one of the astronauts. Or maybe he swam the English Channel. Or, “Didn’t he win a big fight?”

No, he didn’t win a big fight. He lost one.

You won’t find the name of “Joe Tscheiller” in any history book, but there for a while it did seem that Joe was trying for the Guinness Book of World Records. More about that in a moment.

I guess his name is still on a plaque in downtown McAdenville that bears the names under the heading “Those who served.” You will find Joe’s name there. He was one of the GI Joes who went off to war and, luckily, came back.

It was after he came back, some of his friends say, that he got his head in a bottle and couldn’t get it out. That was when the fight began.

Before it was over and before his obituary ran in The Gazette, Joe Tscheiller had established some kind of record in Gaston County — and who knows where else — for being arrested for drunkenness.

From a faded clipping of a story that I wrote about Joe (no date), this:

“The Gaston County Clerk of Court’s records indicate that Joe had been arrested 398 times since 1973. That was the year that the county started keeping records. Prior to that, Gastonia kept its own records, and those were not available. But officials at the police department who were on a first-name basis with Joe said that his arrest record before ’73 was as big or bigger. Put them together, and you have in the neighborhood of 800 arrests during a lifetime.”

The first time I came across the name of “Joe Tscheiller” was shortly after I came to work atThe Gazette, in 1950. The name kept popping up on the police blotter and in court records. He was what police call “a revolving-door drunk.” He had a problem and there seemed to be nobody or no thing that could help him with it.

It wasn’t that he didn’t try. He tried desperately. He had been in and out of the detox center many times. He would come out with a new attitude and a determination to leave liquor alone. But then he would find himself with some of his cronies. They would offer him a drink, and it would be on again. A cop would come along, Joe would be arrested, and it would be off to the pokey one more time.

Joe was on a first-name basis with every sheriff for years. When Dwight Beam was sheriff, he made Joe a trustee and put him in charge of the kitchen. Later, Sheriff Leroy Russell said, “Joe was just like a person on the payroll. You could depend on him to work hard and do a good job.”

I doubt if anyone knows what put Joe on the bottle. He probably didn’t know himself. He served a hitch in the U.S. Infantry during World War II, but he always refused to talk about that.

His last few years found Joe with watery eyes and muscles that had turned to fat and flab. His step was tentative as worry and concern invaded his mind.

“It’s time for me to straighten up,” he told a friend.

But it seemed that he never did.

Bill Williams is a former editor of The Gazette and writes a weekly column.